the ever popular new tank question(s) :D

Hatchling

I'm a few months away from my setup of my tank and since I of course value the opinions of everyone here more than the rest of the Internet riff-raff .....

I've been surfing for info and so of course I have planty of questions:

My plan is to do a tank with sump/refugium combo. I really want the refugium so I probably could not be talked out of it unless it was a octo death warrant.

The sump I'm looking for would have space for the skimmer, probes, heaters and the refugium. What are the best DIY plans that you've seen?

Ive seen conversation on internal stand pipe over flows (dulce [sp]), siphon over flows (not a desired option) and the waterline hole in the back. The waterline hole(s) seem to be the best idea .... but I don't see alot of information about it. any Web pages that can be recommended about it?

Wave makers: The wife is giving me one chance to do this so I need to make it as potentialy multipurpose as possible, so I'd need to have possibility of waves/tide motion. the tunze turbella's sound good is there a more prefered mehtod?

O. bimaculoides

If you only get one chance, buy the biggest tank possible. Run a closed loop external pump and have it return via a 4 or 8 way valve. That'll give you plenty of random flow, no powerheads, reasonable cost and allow you a reef if you decide to in the future.

TONMO Supporter

Good idea with the refugium! I have used it in the past and stuffed it with caulerpa, it does help a lot, great place for baby octos as they are full of amphipods after a while... so yeah, do the refugium.

I always prefer the waterline overflow. And i have always had two holes so if the octo covers one the other keeps flowing. Reef sites are bound to have good sections on overflows etc. Mine were all home made.

I have never used a wavemaker on a ceph tank so that will be interesting to see how it turns out... for a long time my cuttle tank had the powerheads on a timer. I had two hagen 402s at each end and they blew in one direction for a couple of hours then swapped over. It worked well for dislodging waste on the rocks from the messy buggers.

O. vulgaris

I have a little input here, I am not sure if you are very familiar with setting up a sump for an aquarium system, but what I do in my reef-to-be tank, and what my friend here at work does on his 120g reef (and many others do), is to just use any container for the sump box itself. I use a 15g tall tank, and he uses a large rubbermaid-style vat/tub. Sump boxes are EXPENSIVE and in my eyes never seem very well planned, or roomy enough to accomodate skimmers/etc. If you plan on using a lot of live rock (which I hope you are), then all you really need is flow, not some fancy sump box. This would also give you serious freedom as to adding a refugium to things.